1 of 2
Photograph by Strauss Peyton
2 of 2
Image of Heather and Woody
When the wedding guest list rose to 500, the prospective groom—Woody Lalumondiere, a pro-soccer player–turned–pharmaceutical rep from a big easygoing family in Fenton—stayed philosophical. “I get to invite nearly everyone I want,” he reminded himself, “and there’s a lot to be said for that.”
When invitations to a bridesmaids’ dinner, groomsmen’s smoker, rehearsal dinner, open house, brunch and six showers piled up next to the monogrammed, crystal-adorned place cards, table cards, table-number cards, menus and programs, Woody started to feel a little dizzy. He focused on the reunion soccer game planned for November 11, the Friday before the wedding, with everybody from his grade-school buddies to his former teammates in the Eastern Indoor Soccer League. At the rehearsal dinner afterward, they could watch high-school–tournament play through the windows at the Anheuser-Busch Conference and Sports Center.
Ah, but on Saturday ... after the ceremony at Washington University’s Graham Chapel, guests would be shuttled to a reception at the Falls Reception & Conference Center in Columbia, Ill.—with $30,000 worth of tenting enclosing a cocktail-party area stretching 120 feet back from the valet carport, right across the top of the 30-foot waterfall. There would be ice sculptures, seafood displays, dinner and dancing and fireworks, a cigar bar and an arcade.
By now, Woody’s older sister—whom he had teased mercilessly about her “big” wedding—was exacting revenge one arched eyebrow at a time.
Then Woody learned that, at the end of the wedding ceremony, he was to release two doves, and two dozen more would be released behind him. “Like I really need to release doves,” he muttered.
“I could marry you under a bridge tomorrow,” he blurted to his fiancée, Heather Hawk, a health and fitness correspondent for Fox and Charter with her own ESPN radio show. “You want the day, that’s fine. I just want the girl. I know you’ll make it meaningful, and I’ll enjoy every minute of it—but all I want is our life together.”
Woody (“James Woodrow” when engraved) met Heather two years ago, hanging out with mutual friends at O.B. Clark’s after a Mizzou game. He was 27 and recently broken up with a girlfriend; she was 25 and indifferent to future prospects. “She walked in and blew me away,” he says. “Oh my God, she was so beautiful.” After a few dates, he asked her to his farm. “That was always the acid test. If you don’t like the farm, we have to break up.” He grins. “She loved the farm.”
At what point did he know he wanted to marry her? “That night at O.B. Clark’s,” he says instantly, “but I’ve never told her that. I’m going to tell her as we are saying our vows.”
Before proposing, Woody went to talk to Heather’s father, Tom Hawk, an orthopedic surgeon. “He didn’t say yes right away,” Woody recalls. “He gave me some good pointers. He wanted to make sure I could make his daughter happy.”
On February 4, with Valentine’s Day right around the corner, Woody took Heather to Frank Papa’s on Brentwood. He’d reserved a table in the wine cellar and had a dozen roses delivered. “She kept saying, ‘This is the best dinner I’ve ever had,’” Woody recalls. “I don’t even remember what I ate.” After dinner, he went down on one knee to propose, and the instant Heather said yes, a waiter came around the corner and popped champagne. Woody had arranged for their parents and Heather’s adored grandmother to join them at the restaurant. Later, the couple went to O.B. Clark’s for a celebratory drink with the friend who had introduced them.
The next morning, the planning began.
An only child, Heather had dreamed of a big Cinderella’s-ball wedding since childhood. Her mother, Janice Hawk, is a former dancer/choreographer with a talent for throwing parties, and the two women work well together. At 13, Heather learned that she had spina bifida, and she was given exercises to strengthen her back. She fell in love with fitness, and, when she turned 17, she and her mother went into business together, producing fitness tapes and managing Heather’s media career.
They knew that they could pull off this particular production. But when Woody suggested a wedding date in October, they gulped. Could they have one more month?
The date was set for November 12, and the Hawk women flew into action. They briefly considered the usual reception places, but Heather had emceed bridal shows at the Falls, and she loved it there. Guests would be coming from 15 states anyway; with a bus to ease the trip across the river, having the reception in Columbia, Ill., would become part of the weekend’s fun.
The Falls catered a series of smaller prewedding parties and planted thousands of pansies in the same deep blue chosen for the bridesmaids’ dresses. Staffers listened patiently to the plans for music and cocktails, saying nothing when they realized that their access to the kitchen would be blocked. The next time the Hawks came for a planning meeting, workers were digging up mud to put in a new walkway.
“We take the client’s vision and figure out how to make it work,” says Christine Isaak, director of sales and catering at the Falls. “You have to make sure your chef can handle it, your staff can handle it, your building can handle it. The Hawks wanted to keep their guests wondering what the next surprise would be. If you can make that work, you create magic.”
Over time, every obstacle dissolved. Janice found a wedding cake that Heather, who’s allergic to nuts and addicted to real buttercream icing, could enjoy with abandon. Knowing the vagaries of St. Louis weather, Janice arranged for both heating and cooling of the outdoor tents. “I’m a firm believer in plan B,” she says. “Weather could put a damper on wedding photos at Forest Park and on the doves—they’re homing pigeons, and if it’s too cloudy or rainy, they can’t find their way home.”
Janice also wanted fireworks—and not metaphorical ones—to announce that dinner was served. The display would be timed to music, and more fireworks would explode when the bride and groom kissed. Later, confetti cannons would go off as the bands (the Bob Kuban Brass and the Well Hungarians) began to play. Tom Hawk was nervous about safety, though—and so was Columbia’s fire marshal. So Janice promised to keep the pyrotechnics outside, ordered tents with clear-view ceilings and invited Columbia’s entire volunteer fire department to the reception.
Janice and Heather threw parties to get the invitations stuffed and crystals affixed to the envelopes, the guests eating and laughing their way through the chores. The Hawks arranged for monogramming on the wedding invitations, menus, programs, table cards, cake, ice sculpture, napkins, hand towels in the powder rooms and matches in the cigar bar. They planned gift baskets for out-of-town guests, using boxes with pictures of St. Louis from Basket Creations and everything inside either made in St. Louis or about St. Louis.
They made sure that extra staff could be brought in so that there would be one server for every table and everyone could eat dinner at the same time.
And they found cobalt-blue satin dresses with sparkly trim for the six bridesmaids and four junior bridesmaids. “ Something new” for Heather was a pair of diamond earrings, her wedding gift from her father. “This will be the last time I give you jewelry,” he told her, his voice choked. Inside the box were 1-karat diamond studs she could wear every day—and strands of three diamonds, designed by Janice with the family jeweler, Allan Blau, to be clasped on for special occasions.
“Something old” was the handkerchief Janice’s grandmother had given Janice on her wedding day, monogrammed with the initial “L.” Heather was the fifth generation on her mother’s side of the family to marry from an “H” maiden name to an “L.” Her mom used to tease her: “When you date someone with an “L” name, we’ll know.” When Heather met Woody, the first question was his surname—and Heather didn’t yet know it. She asked him on their first date—then ran to the ladies’ room to call her mother with the news.
“Something borrowed” was the white beaded purse Janice carried at her own wedding. For “something blue,” Heather had a garter and her mom’s childhood rosary. And for luck they found the sixpence Janice had placed in her own wedding slipper.
They kept only a few secrets to surprise Woody. Because their own horses were crowd-shy—and Heather didn’t want to risk getting bucked on her wedding day—two Percheron draft horses, one white and one black, would be waiting for the bride and groom to ride away from the chapel. A carriage would follow, large enough for all 22 members of the wedding party. Photos would be taken at Forest Park and at Woody and Heather’s new house, where he’d carry her over the threshold.
When it came to music, food and the party, though, Heather wanted to make sure she included anything Woody wanted. She read him the reception dinner menu—herb-encrusted beef tenderloin with a morel demiglace, seared halibut in lobster nage (a bisque with chunks of lobster), chive-wrapped haricots verts, basil-roasted fingerling potatoes, a chocolate waterfall, the cake. Was there anything he wanted to add?
“Yeah,” he said, scanning the long and illustrious wine list. “Can we get some Bud Select bottles?”
Through the nine months of wedding planning, Heather and Woody were also having a house built; Heather was producing a wedding workout fitness tape and traveling for Danskin as director of fitness programming; Janice was training young girls to walk, stand and carry debutantes’ trains as pages for the Veiled Prophet Ball. But it wasn’t the logistics that stressed them; it was the emotional negotiations. “Trying to consider everyone’s feelings and wishes has been more emotional and more time-consuming than I anticipated,” Janice admits.
Everyone had his or her private struggle. For Heather, it was melding two very different families—and convincing her own parents that she wasn’t neglecting them. “You are always going to be my parents,” she said. “I’ve got to ease my way into this new family.” Janice watched and realized that she had to help: “The bride is trying to build this bridge between the families, and she’s depending on her mother to help her, and the mother is going, ‘Hey, what about me?’”
Woody, meanwhile, was trying to grasp the intensity of Heather’s lifelong bond with her mother—an only-child bond very different from the easy, no-holds-barred teasing relationship he had with his siblings.
The bridesmaids were realizing that each of them thought that she knew Heather best. “I have advice for people giving showers,” Janice says, wincing. “Don’t play a game about who knows the bride best.”
And Heather’s grandmother was coping with the fact that her grandbaby wasn’t being married in the Catholic Church—and was writing her own vows.
“The first time I met Woody’s family, he was taking me to a friend’s wedding,” Heather recalls. “They wrote their own vows. We both turned to each other, and I said, ‘This is how a wedding should be.’”
Janice made her peace with a nontraditional wedding filled with music, love and joy. “I wanted to put everyone into sensory overload,” she says. “I want them to hear great music and conversation, be surrounded by beautiful things to see and delicious food to eat, experience an outpouring of emotions and dance the night away!” Her real worry was that she’d begun crying all the time. Ever the problem-solver, she asked a family friend, an ophthalmologist, whether he could do something to paralyze her tear ducts. He laughed at her.
Heather’s father figured that he’d cry, too—but didn’t care. He was looking forward to “the ceremony itself, as well as the reception, because I’ve got joyful responsibilities at both. Walking Heather down the aisle will be bittersweet—or, at least, very emotional. We’ve raised her for this day—but she’s our one and only child.”
As for the reception, they’d been practicing their dance (to his favorite song, “Stairway to Heaven”) for weeks.
As for Heather’s future happiness, he’d already given his best advice at the groomsmen’s party he threw at the Ritz-Carlton cigar bar. Asked his advice for a happy marriage, he answered instantly: “The most important thing is to compromise. You both start out with a certain amount of rigidity. After a while, you start to realize that compromise is the way to go, and your life becomes much smoother.”
Setting the Timetable
Thursday evening: Bridesmaids’ dinner at the Melting Pot after pedicures all around.
Friday: The big soccer game, followed by the rehearsal dinner at St. Louis Soccer Park.
Saturday: The bride and her maids dress at the Hawks’ house, the groom and his groomsmen at Heather and Woody’s new house, with breakfast catered.
The ceremony begins at 2:30 p.m. at Graham Chapel. Afterward, the doves are released and the couple ride off to Forest Park for photos. Box lunches have been prepared for the wedding party. Guests have time to nap before the bus leaves for the reception.
Saturday evening: At the Falls, cars are whisked away by valets, and the guests enter the tented cocktail-party area, walking toward the 30-foot waterfall, where the receiving line waits. When dinner is served, they move into the ballroom. Later there will be dancing, more fireworks, a tented cigar bar at the smaller waterfall and—just when the evening’s excitement seems to be ending—a surprise announcement of an arcade game, brought in for all the deer hunters who missed the season’s opening day to attend the wedding.
Sunday: Open house and brunch at the Hawks’ house. “Let’s keep this party going,” says Janice. “I don’t plan to sleep from Thursday until Tuesday anyway.”
Monday: Tom drives the newlyweds to the airport in the wee hours for their honeymoon in St. Lucia. Then he and Janice pack up their three golden retrievers and head to their lake house for a happy collapse.
special delivery
The Hawks were standing in the postage-stamp store, looking at sheet after sheet and uninspired by all of them, when the woman behind the counter suggested visiting www.stamps.com and turning a favorite photo into a stamp. So Janice cropped the engagement photo of Woody and Heather—taken on a chilly, sunny morning as they stood next to their horses—and used it as the stamp for the save-the-date card. ("Now I'm really going to get hazed," groaned Woody.)
finding the dress
In March, during a business trip to New York, Heather found her shoes at Barneys and her tiara at the Swarovski store. But she came back to the bridal gown she'd tried on in St. Louis, at Saks. Grandmother Lolita LoPiccolo had pointed it out, murmuring, "You never like what I like, but just try this one."
Heather thought to herself, "OK, I'll try it on for Grandma, but I don't love it." Then she stepped into the gown—strapless, with a fitted bodice and rhinestones and beadwork blazing at the scalloped neckline, edging the bottom of the bodice and running down the center of the train.
"Grandma!" she gasped. "It's perfect!"
Many jokes followed—who would have guessed that her grandmother, who is legally blind, would be the one to find the dress? But Heather wasn't really surprised. She grew up spending Saturday nights with her grandparents, and she'd come to revere this woman.
Heather's bouquet would be dendrobium orchids; several varieties of roses, some with ruffled edges, in various degrees of bloom; and stargazer lilies, with crystals sparkling among the petals.
creating the cake
The Cakery Bakery created a five-tier cake with a faux bottom so that it could be displayed then moved. Beneath the sculpted white façade—adorned with Swarovski-crystal cake jewelry on silver sticks—lay two flavors: French-vanilla cake layered with vanilla buttercream and chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream. Shower gifts included a Waterford cake topper and engraved cake knife.
choosing the music
At Graham Chapel, music would come from a string quartet, trumpet, piano and organ.
"My direction to the musicians has been "We want this to be joyful," says Janice. "The grandmothers will walk to the "Ave Maria," mothers to 'Because You Loved Me.' I keep playing it, hoping I'll stop crying." Junior bridesmaids would walk to 'Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring,' bridesmaids to Purcell's 'Trumpet Voluntary' and Heather to the traditional 'Here Comes the Bride'—'Bridal Chorus' by Richard Wagner—with a huge fanfare.
The Hawks contacted an old family friend, a Paraguayan harpist living in Grand Cayman, and arranged for him to come and play 'Stairway to Heaven,' Tom Hawk's sentimental favorite, for his dance with his daughter.
An Elegant Ensembles string quartet would play during the cocktail reception; Larry Pry would play piano during dinner; and, after dinner, two bands would take over: the Bob Kuban Brass and the Well Hungarians.
Flowers: Montano Grant Florist, 314-863-6386
Cake: The Cakery Bakery, 314-647-6000 www.thecakerybakery.net
Photographer: Strauss Peyton Studio, 314-997-8966
Videographer: Canyon Studios, 314-655-2675
Reception, catering: The Falls Reception & Conference Center 888-538-7778
Music: Elegant Ensembles, 314-432-0606; Bob Kuban Entertainment Agency, 314-532-0788; Well Hungarians, 618-550-TUNE
Carriage and horses: Brookdale Farms, 636-458-0271
